Skipping audio, slower servers, everyone knows the symptoms of latency. But to know what's going on in the system, what's causing the latency, how to fix it... that's a hard question without good answers right now.

LatencyTOP is a Linux* tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where in the system latency is happening, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen so that the code can be changed to avoid the worst latency hiccups.

There are many types and causes of latency. LatencyTOP focuses on the type of latency that causes skips in audio, stutters in your desktop experience or that overloads your server (while you have plenty of CPU power left).

LatencyTOP focuses on the cases where the applications want to run and execute useful code, but there's some resource that's not currently available (and the kernel then blocks the process). This is done both on a system level and on a per process level, so that you can see what's happening to the system, and which process is suffering and/or causing the delays.

Installation:
Go to yast -- software management and search for pacakage "LatencyTOP" after getting the results select the pacakage and install it

After successful installation goto console and fire command (root) : # latencytOP and check/monitor the process and their activities.

LatencyTOP measures the average and maximum amount of latency in various operations by inserting annotation calls in the kernel

A list of process names runs along the bottom of the display, which can be selected with the arrow keys. The latency sources for that process will then be shown in the lower pane